The Ultimate Business Machine - Archives

Luca 2.2.1

Over the weekend I've fixed some (rather embarrassing) user interface bugs with the last release of Luca, like buttons and text not sticking to their corners when windows get resized, or the default financial period not getting saved to preferences when the save-to-defaults button was pressed.

Notifications also work better now, so when something happens in one window, e.g., when a voucher gets deleted, the totals showing on other windows will all get updated automatically.

Also, I had some problems mapping date fields between SQLite and MySQL, especially handling NULL data types. These are handled better now.

Things To Do

1. I need to improve the speed in which data is imported/exported between SQLite and MySQL. This is currently slow and still not robust enough to handle, e.g., three years worth of data without hanging.

2. I need to put in a button to let the user choose whether to drop a database before exporting the data. Currently it assumes you want to overwrite the destination database and tables in MySQL.

Here is someone I know who's using Luca with MySQL now - Jan Steinman at VeggieVanGogh.

3. Need to handle the "last one cent" problem better, e.g., when a dollar is split three ways and you put them back again, you get 99 cents. Which account should get the last one cent so that the debits and credits always balance, no matter how often you go back and edit or rollback the data?

This problem shows up when you're apportioning amounts to cost centres or when you're doing currency exchange gain/loss calculations. I don't think I've ever totally solved it while we were doing custom applications - once in a while, our user would find that she can't save the voucher because the accounts are out by one cent. In a custom application, we're on hand to guide the user to correct this manually. But not when it's going to be a "shrink-wrapped" application. So I've got to pin this down once and for all.

4. Tax handling on line items rather than on the consolidated total.

5. After all these I think I can move on to the invoicing module, a payroll module, or a time-billing module? Actually I have pieces of quite a lot of these in 4th Dimension code.

I'm like a PC guy who just loves Macs. I do these PC things for PC-using companies but I want to use a Mac. I'm stuck between art and science, engineering and design, the PC and the Mac.

Luca is a work-in-progress - for the Mac as The Ultimate Business Machine. Do keep the suggestions coming.